When it comes to making Art about Nature, artists have forever had to fight against the obvious: nature needs no help being beautiful. Can artists wring anything new and wonderful from the landscape, from a sunset, from leaves floating on a pond? Yes, of course. But is it enough to repeat and confirm what we all know so well?

Uh, no. Of course not. From an art world point of view, the days of painters Claude Lorrain or Thomas Cole or photographer Ansel Adams are long gone.

The problem of relevance haunts the undeniably beautiful work by six artists in the latest annual Mohawk-Hudson Regional Invitational at Albany Center Gallery. It was the last day of February when I visited. The big trees outside were starting to blush with signs of an early spring, birds in the bushes were flitting in earnest. Can mere prints, drawings, and paintings, all striving to make more beauty out of the beautiful, compete?

Happily, the answer here is yes ... sometimes.

At just a few inches each, the heavy black-on-white woodcut prints by George Dirolf look like imaginative, old-fashioned book plates. These are not studies of nature, but designs that employ natural cues.

In the perfectly titled "Watching Winter," the force of a bird's flight brings stars in its wings, the darkness of feathers becoming the clarity of sky. For "Maple Seedling," the rising trunk of a newly born tree is made to levitate above its bared roots against more blackness. Dirolf's set of four related prints touch on elemental human concerns: life, love, hope, forgiveness. If life had said "live" we might have a new declaration of verbs, like the "Four Freedoms," here presented each by a different animal: a dragonfly, a turtle.

Dirolf makes woodcuts—engravings in blocks of wood that are then inked and printed. The print-like work by T. Klacsmann is partly remarkable for pulling off that look using digital processes. No messy ink required. His birds of prey loom large with layers of color when compared to Dirolf's work, but they strive for a similar feeling of dark, linear depiction that flattens on the page and creates pattern as much as representation.

One of these stood above the others by adding an element of surprise and mystery. Called "Black Hawk," it shows what the title suggests, a bold image of a bird. But in the background, easy to miss, is a tiny helicopter, which for me connected to the famous (and notorious) Black Hawk military helicopters. I perked up.

The site-specific drawings by Richard Barlow are another reason to perk up. On two vertical floor-to-ceiling sections in the center of the gallery, Barlow drew trees right on the walls, using white chalk on a black ground. They help transform the space, much as his similar but very much larger drawing did in the full Mohawk-Hudson Regional last year at the Albany Institute of History and Art.

These might threaten to steal the show, but really the best work here is in the smallest pieces, including Barlow's own series of delicate, minimalist drawings on vellum, beautifully complicated by layers of silver leaf. These are landscapes and evocations of place, some with trees in foreground and background, all rendered in silver and shadowy shades of platinum gray. The beauty is quite tactile, something to see firsthand.

My interest flagged a bit from here. At first, some square photographs of landscapes in negative tonality were intriguing, but they followed formula too easily. The oversharpened black and white photographs of lily pads didn't rise above their simple origins. And a few thoughtfully painted clouds at sunset are very nice indeed but familiar stuff.

Tony Iadicicco, the director of the gallery and organizer of the final show, has pulled off a curatorial coup here, integrating and overlapping styles and concerns with true insight. Though unabashedly conservative and attractive, the 2018 Invitational revels in natural beauty, and taken as an organic whole it's far greater than the sum of its varied parts.